turan_ecology

The Climate and Ecology

of the Turan Flats

The Turan Flatlands, also known simply as Turan, encompass an area from the Caspian Sea in the west, the Aral sea in the north, the Altai, Hindu-Kush and Kopet-Dag mountains in the south, and to the east the area including the ancient city of Ferghana, and the westernmost parts of China and Tibet. In total size it is about the same lengthwise as the distance from the Mississippi River to the West Coast in the United States, or the distance from Lisbon to Athens in Europe.

Though referred to as the "Turan Flats," Turan itself was (and is today) not exactly flat. The elevation rises from the 28 meters below sea level of the Caspian Sea to 342 meters above sea level in the east. In addition, the southern edge of the Turan area is subject to relatively frequent and severe earthquakes; in the last century alone, the city of Ashkabad (where the Akhal Oasis is marked on the map at left) was twice levelled by earthquakes, in 1924 and again in 1948. In the latter quake, every building in Ashkabad was destroyed with the exception of the railway station and the Communist Party headquarters. (You can read more about these earthquakes in Maslow's book, Sacred Horses. He notes that when he visited Ashkabad in the late 1980s, damage from the '48 earthquake was still visible throughout Ashkabad.)

The land here is, on the whole, dry, and drier now than it was in older times. The Oxus river, today called the Amu Darya, at one time emptied into the Caspian sea, watering what is now the Kara Kum ("Black Sand") desert. The old river channel can still be seen in satellite photos today. The photo at right shows the old channel in the upper right. Water no longer flows into the smaller sea, called the Kara Bogaz Gol, from whence it once flowed into the Caspian, the darker body of water on the left; the Kara Bogaz Gol is now three meters lower than the Caspian Sea. For many years in the latter half of the 20^th century, the Kara Bogaz Gol itself was nearly empty; water now flows into it from a canal built in the 1980s in an effort to halt the salinification of the surrounding land.

Eleven thousand years ago, the area from a short way north of the northernmost tip of the Caspian sea and thence north was covered in ice. The land to between the Casian and Aral Sea was at that time mostly marshland, and quite wet. The drier, grassier areas to the south, between the Kara Bogaz Gol and the Kopet Dag Mountains, was fertile prairie; it supported antelope, wolves, and horses who were now migrating to this area from North America over the Bering Land Bridge.

Today the influence of the glaciers is completely gone. The Amu-Darya no longer waters the area between the Caspian and the Aral, which has become the Kara Kum Desert. Human hands have pushed the desertification process ahead. In the early 20^th century, the Kara Kum Canal was built to divert the Amu-Darya's water across the more cultivatable areas north of the Kopet Dag. With its main input source gone, the Aral sea, which is actually a very large salt lake, is rapidly drying out; at the present time it is estimated to be only a third in size of what it was in 1800. In some years, no water reaches it at all. Prevailing southerly winds blow evaporating salt-water, and powdered salt, on the lands south of the Aral, making plant growth difficult to impossible. The last remaining places in present-day Turkmenistan where horses can be grazed are a 20-30 kilometer wide ribbon at the foot of the northern slope of the Kopet Dag mountains.

The climate of this area today is extremely continental. Summers are long and very hot; temperatures often reach as high or higher than 55° C. In winter it becomes so cold that the salt Aral Sea itself can become covered in ice. (Excellent photos of the Aral Sea ice covered and otherwise can be found on the NASA Photo Library website, with good commentary on the state of the area.)

There are, however, oases throughout this area. Most people think of an oasis in terms of those found in the Sahara or Arabian desert, generally fed by a single spring. In steppe country, oases are much larger, often watered by numerous springs and rivers descending from mountains. The Akhal Oasis, the home of the Akhal-Teke Turkmen, encompasses the entire northern slope of the Kopet Dag mountains in Turkmenistan. The Ferghana oasis encompasses the entire Ferghana Valley. The Oasis of Merv (present-day Mary) is smaller, and several times in the past the entire city has been walled in to keep nomads out.

The photograph above gives a very good idea of the ground which the Turanian, and more recently the various strains of the Turkoman, horse have to cover. The ground is hard, with low grasses, and in this region amazingly flat. (This part of the steppe is on the Iranian plateau, with the mountains of southern Turkmenistan in the background. It was taken by Louise Firouz and used here with her permission.) The photo at left shows some of the more mountainous areas which border ancient Turan. In the springtime, there is lush grass, as here. After August, the grass is no more. (Photo by Louise Firouz, used with permission).

To Be Continued…

To learn more about Turkmenistan today, please visit

the Turkmenian Embassy at http://mh102.infi.net/~embassy

or the Turkmenistan Information Center at http://www.turkmenistan.com

For interesting satellite photographs of Turkmenistan and the surrounding region, please visit: http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov

Return to Turanian Horse Home Page

Last update Friday, October 30, 1998